Financing transmedia programmes and others, the situation today
by Marc Guidoni , published on 11.09.2009
Volume 1: The situation today
As we have seen, the advent of transmedia in the content realm is, above all, a means of inventing innovative narrative universes that are apt to jive better with the expectations of young audiences. But it is also the chance to tap and pool new sources of funding for the programme industry.
Since the late 1990s, in fact, it has grown increasingly difficult for producers to initiate and put together fundraising drives and then clinch project funding, whether for the cinema or for television. Every country is affected, even those like France in which the regulatory framework and the broadcasters’ obligations to invest are reputedly favourable to the audiovisual industries.
Generally speaking, the bulk of film financing comes from major communication and media groups whose core activity is either in television (TF1, C+, ARTE, HBO etc.) or cinema (Warner, Fox, Gaumont, Pathé, MK2 etc.). Moreover, some well-organized international distribution and sales networks – along with DVD publishers – help prefinance films by providing minimum revenue guarantees.
But on the whole, these traditional sources are tending to run dry, on the one hand owing to intrinsic economic difficulties, and on the other owing to the skyrocketing number of projects looking for funding, which lowers the average “ground-floor” investment.
So money is hard to come by, and yet it is absolutely essential for:
• Project research & development
• Making a film – which, even in this digital age, remains a painstaking handcrafted “one-off”: each film is a veritable “cathedral” of images.
• Managing – even just a little – the budget at small and medium-sized production companies: allowing for at least about three years between getting a project set up and the moment it starts generating box office or TV revenue.
To meet this growing need for cash, two recent trends are observable:
• The internationalization of traditional funding: the boom in international coproductions, which are harder and harder to organize and keep going owing to the complexity of reconciling what are sometimes conflicting rules in different countries. A great many professional gatherings, generally piggybacking on cinema or television festivals, are spawning a host of transnational collaborations.
• The diversification of funding: we see more and more diverse forms of fund-raising, crowd-sourcing, sponsoring, patronage, product placement and so on and so forth. But careful, one has to be on the ball: “Stupid, nasty advertising is simply not on anymore,” says Georges Nahon, CEO of France Télécom/Orange Labs in San Francisco, which works, among other things, on digital content innovation on various platforms.
Evidently, content funding is a constantly-evolving science.…
